This Chip Could Change Computing Forever

I've heard, for about 20 years now, that a development just around the corner will make laptops last a week without a charge. Never happens. Color me skeptic.

"Imagine your phone lasting for days" Why yes, I do remember the 3310

When I was young...we used graphite rods encased in wood to do calculations on flat sheets of wood pulp.

Graphene is just like Nuclear fusion, always 10 years away 😅

It's intriguing how often I stumble upon a seemingly groundbreaking technology, only to discover it's been around since the mid-20th century.

10 years ago: "We gonna have graphene computers!" 10 years from now: "We gonna have graphene computers!"

Back in 2003 when I was studying Computer Science at FSU, one of the breakthroughs the university had was regarding graphene. I'm still waiting for it to materialize into ANYTHING we use daily or get a benefit out of.

Graphene breakthroughs seem to happen just often enough that makes me believe I'll never live long enough to see any graphene products.

The year is 2120... We will finally have graphene computers in 10 years!

This is the same case as with batteries, every year you hear about some breakthrough tech and still your phone dies in a day with the same old lithium battery.

I'll believe it when I see it. They said we're gonna have solid state batteries 5 years ago and we still have nothing.

Very impressive but the most important info is missing: How did they achieve the "semiconductiveness" for graphine? What is going on in detail so the meterial behaves that way?

A little thing about graphene synthesis. There is a company out of San Diego called Grolltex which has made strides in synthesis and fabrication. Their CEO did his PhD thesis on the subject, too. The main bottleneck is not necessarily the synthesis of pristine graphene, but transferring and fabricating on different surfaces. That's what this company is trying to do. I know the sad joke about graphene being able to do anything except leave the lab, but the number of companies that are working on scaling, the number of companies working on graphene fabrication infrastructure, and also the very smart people in materials synthesis labs have put out lots of papers recently on the subject. There is one professor at Johns Hopkins who is working on graphene synthesis via CO2 splitting, which is exciting. If you're an aspiring materials scientist or chemist, this is a great field to be in right now.

There's 9 Tech Readiness Levels, and a working graphene transistor is TRL 3. They still have a looooong ways to go.

Those chips will run ads faster.

Wow amazing! Thank you for covering this!

But when will we achieve cold fusion?

Graphene based chips? This has been speculated on and teased for many, many years. I’ll believe it when I see it

"Electrons can only be in a few discrete layers, or shells, above the nucleus, which we can call bands" A band is not the same as a shell. A shell is what you get if you have more-or-less isolated atoms (or molecules), like in a gas or a liquid. A band is what you get in denser materials such as crystals, and it's a collective thing involving the entire structure of the material. A shell only allows one energy (e.g. the ground state of the hydrogen atom has an energy of -13.6 eV, take it or leave it), but a band allows a whole range of energies, which secretly are like lots of little shells extremely close together, and shared across the entire material.

This isn't the first time I hear about graphene chips, but last time I checked on the subject, someone suggested a silicene alternative that - in theory - would be easier to engineer since computer chips use silicon anyway.